First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde

I love to read, and tend to read widely. While I read a lot of science fiction, I also read mysteries, historical fiction, some contemporary fiction, and a number of the classics, from Austen and Dickens through Joyce and Faulkner. So I really fell for Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, the first of his novels about Thursday Next, literary detective. “Literary detective” is meant literally here. Thursday lives in a world similar to ours but where books are a far more important part of ordinary life, and the literary detectives deal with crimes involving literature. In The Eyre Affair, this becomes even more literal when Jane Eyre is kidnapped out of the first edition of her novel and held for ransom. Thursday must rescue Jane and defeat the villain – which of course she does. Thursday returned in several more books – Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and Something Wicked – in which we find our more about the world inside of books as Thursday must solve more literary crimes. All are good books, though the latter two seem to lose their way a bit; they’re fun, but not really up to the level of the first two books in the series (in part because the universe Fforde created was getting so complicated that it threatened to tie itself into a knots). First Among Sequels, the latest in the series, is a step up toward the level of the earlier books in the series – fun, witty, and exciting.

The book starts years after Something Rotten. Thursday is now in hear early fifties, married, and with children: one a genius, another apparently destined to invent the time machine and lead the ChronoGuard (though he’s showing no signs of doing anything other than being a lazy teenager who likes to sleep past noon and listen to heavy metal bands). SpecOps has been disbanded, and Thursday works for Acme Carpet, which is secretly a freelance SpecOps (paid for both by installing carpet and by Thursday's elicit cheese smuggling).

Thursday is still heavily involved in the book world, where the Council of Genres is having to deal with such pending crisis as the potential border war between the genres of Racy Novel, Feminism, and Ecclesiastical Literature. Racy Novel, having been declared a part of the “Axis of Unreadable,” claims to have developed a “dirty bomb,” which if exploded will hurtle obscene phrases into other novels. Meanwhile, “read rates” are going down across the board, causing another crisis of sorts, as more and more people stop reading and instead watch such popular reality TV shows as Samaritan Kidney Swap and Britian’s Funniest Chainsaw Mishaps.

To complicate things for Thursday, she winds up with first one apprentice, then two. Over the years, of course, Thursday’s adventures have been turned into books (with titles They Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, etc.). So of course, since all characters in books exist in the book world, so does the character of Thursday next. Thursday had been unhappy with how the first four books turned out – too full of sex and violence, so she had pushed for a different type of fifth book, and The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco had featured a kinder, gentler, very new-agey Thursday Next (and sales tanked). So Thursday is saddled first with Thursday5 (the kinder, gentler Thursday), then also with Thursday1-4, who is brash and obnoxious.

In the midst of all of this, Thursday is trying to figure out why read rates are dropping, who is trying to kill her, what the ghost of her Uncle Mycroft was trying to tell her, what strange conspiracy was underway in the book world, and why the Goliath Corporation was now acting nicely toward her. By book’s end, she must save all of English Literature from being destroyed and turned into bad reality TV. (If that were to happen in our world, the books would still be there; we could ignore the bad TV versions. Not so in Thursday’s world.) Along the way, we get plenty of amusing literary references and cameos (from the whole cast of Pride and Prejudice to Dr. Temperance Brennan) and some great jokes. Fforde is clearly widely read himself, and has a great fondness and appreciation for the classics. (If you haven’t read Fforde, take my word for it that all this seemingly overly complicated stuff does fit together (mostly) in amusing ways. Pick up The Eyre Affair and you’ll see what I mean.)

The whole thing comes to a pretty satisfying conclusion in the next to the last chapter, before that last chapter takes the couple of lose ends still left and sets up the next book. Fforde’s Web site indicates that the sequel is planned for 2009. I can’t wait!